As an example of how public places managed shared entertainment, jukeboxes came into use in the United States around 1940. These machines were installed in taverns. For a fee, patrons could pick their favorite songs from a limited selection of songs available. Song popularity counters told the owner of the machine the number of times each record was played, with the result that popular records remained, while lesser-played songs could be replaced. Nowadays jukeboxes have almost disappeared in the wake of digital technology and miniaturization.
There are many scenarios in which a plurality of people congregate and may spend some time together; sometimes the settings are public places like a restaurant, a movie theater or a bar. Some other times the settings are more private: a private house, a conference, a classroom or a party. Usually, in all of these scenarios customers, guests and passersby collectively enjoy (, or alternatively put up with,) the digital content or settings that are provided by the owner, the operator of the premises or choices and preferences that are set in stone either by the artist or, e.g., a movie editor.
For example, in a bar the operator selects the music, the TV channels, the temperature, the ambiance and other settings. Those choices and preferences set the tone of the public place by attracting certain kind of customers while deterring others. This is also true in private houses. For example, one of the members of a family at home interacts with a thermostat and sets the temperature on behalf of everybody.
The progress in miniaturization of electronics, improved batteries and computing capability has made it possible the creation of portable devices that have the capability of delivering different kinds of digital media content to users. Usually these portable devices interface with a software program that resides on computers; this software is capable of managing the digital content and the preferences that a particular user may have. For example, iTunes is a digital content manager application that allows a user to buy and manage audio and video on a personal computer. Many alternatives to iTunes do exist for managing digital content. Users can organize their music into playlists within one or more libraries, edit file information, record Compact Discs, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through a built-in music store, download free podcasts, back up songs, run a visualizer to display graphical effects synchronized with the music, and encode music into a number of different audio formats.
Libraries are databases of digital media that organize media content. Users can create and maintain them on the memory of a computer or a portable device for different purposes such as to make the digital content and playlists available to other applications stored on the computer or generally a device. Portable user devices are often used to play digital content for the fruition of a single user who is carrying said multimedia device with him and is usually wearing, earphones, headphones, earpieces or other similar accessories.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a community of end-recipients. The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as a generalization for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts services with a user's data, software and computation over a network. Cloud computing has made possible the real time retrieval of data and content. For example, if a user is at a party he can share a song by retrieving it from his or her library in the cloud. When a song is shared, the digital content manager software can stream the song and conventionally it will not save it on the local hard drive in order to prevent unauthorized copying. Recently Google put on the market a device called Nexus Q that, when in guest mode, allows guests at a party via an Android portable device to retrieve songs from their private libraries on Google's cloud and manually queue them into a playlist. These songs are then played locally at the users' location.
Digital technology has also made it possible for digital media works to deviate from an official copy. For example, moviemakers often film alternate endings. These endings are often excluded from the official theatrical version and can subsequently be included as a special feature in the film's DVD release. These alternate endings are a special type of deleted scene. In a public performance of the official copy, the publisher or the movie director usually decides which one of the alternate scenes are included and which one are skipped.
Currently, movie theaters continuously show a movie that repeats itself to different crowds over different intervals. Movies do not adapt to different crowds, recurring viewers, or premium viewers. Moreover, audiences do not have control over the content because such content is shared with other viewers. A movie intended for a public or shared view has an official version that is distributed in certain territories or for different purposes, e.g., its enjoyment on an airplane.
An interactive movie, also known in the past as Movie Game or VCR Game is a video game that features highly cinematic presentation and heavy use of scripting, often using full-motion video of either animated or live-action footage.
This genre came about with the invention of laserdiscs and laserdisc players, the first nonlinear or random access video play devices. The fact that a laserdisc player could jump to and play any chapter instantaneously, rather than proceed in a linear path from start to finish like videotape, meant that games with branching plotlines could be constructed from out-of-order video chapters in much the same way as old Choose Your Own Adventure books could be constructed from out-of-order pages.
Current wireless technologies, such, as for example, cellular 3G, 4G, WIMAX and non-cellular WLAN, Bluetooth and its iBeacon implementation, ZigBee and RF-ID, with their improved speed of data, efficiency and range, provide opportunities for growth, customer satisfaction and efficiency. General positioning technologies have also evolved. Some of these technologies are more suitable for outdoor positioning. These include GPS (Global Positioning Technology), databases mapping locations of base stations/access points, multilateration and cell IDs strength measurement.
Other technologies are more suitable for indoor locationing. Examples are choke points concepts, grid point concepts, long-range sensors concepts, angle of arrival, time of arrival, received strength indication and inertial measurements, RF-ID cell, UWB, Infrared, Visible Light Communication and Positioning techniques, and ultrasound. These short and long-range communication technologies, together with indoor and outdoor positioning technologies provide an opportunity to build backend software, applications and devices that can exploit the knowledge a user's or a user's apparatus location by the system.
A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real world geographic area. A geofence can be dynamically generated as in a radius around a point location that could be stationary or mobile. A geofence can be a predefined set of boundaries connecting points expressed by latitude and longitude, like neighborhood boundaries. Geofencing has been made possible by the introduction of sufficiently precise locationing techniques like, for example, the GPS technology or the multilateration technology and by the miniaturization of electronic components that have made the GPS a standard feature in mobile phones and portable electronics in general.
Many other forms of alternative positioning techniques are under development.
For example, Apple introduced iBeacon to iOS, which is based on Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and is available on Android devices. Conceptually, iBeacons substitute GPS satellites whose position is known, at a micro-location or indoor scale. Several iBeacons could be located in different areas in a building.
IBM Presence Zones is a technology that lets businesses carry out web type analytics for physical venues. It lets them know who is in their physical location, how much time they spend in different areas, the routes they take, how often they visit, and more.
Google's “Nearby” feature for Android will apparently be similar to Apple's iBeacon technology to deliver notifications and trigger features.
Philips has developed a technology based on LED lighting that can communicate with a mobile application and can guide users around. Dubbed Intelligent Lighting, the connected retail lighting system not only illuminates but also acts as a positioning grid.
Other companies are building in-store retail analytics products based on Wi-Fi, cameras on the device or external, audio and magnetic fields. Based on sensing light, BLE signals, Wi-Fi signals, sound or magnetic fields, these technologies show the trend in mobile devices of adding more and more sensors to gain a better understanding of users' context and surroundings. This trend is not limited to mobile phones but it extends to the emerging wearable category of devices as well.